Sports! Sports! Sports! – Podcast

So basically some dude inputs the skills of everything, of every player, the results of everything, everything that happened ever, translates that into probability tables, and then – for fun – people pay money and they…test his math?”

Rich Sommer, Cardboard!

One thing this hobby needs is more coverage in the mainstream board gaming audio/visual media on the web.

In this episode of “Cardboard!” we get to hear about sports board games from the perspective of a board gamer who doesn’t know a lot about sports. Though his “expert” (actor and podcaster Nate Corddry) on the tabletop-sports genre gets a lot of basic fact wrong (Strat-O-Matic invented in the late 60’s?), this episode brings a really fascinating perspective for those of us “die-hards” out there, and is worth a listen.

It’s awesome that you do that, Smitty. I think there must be a huge percentage of war gamers who do love or would love sports games, too. That’s one group of guys I hope that we can reach and your coverage definitely helps!

I found the host and this Corddry guy pretty annoying and condescending, dragging out the same old “baseball nerd” stereotype and saying the Strat inventor (whose name he didn’t even know) thought up the game in “his basement”. On the other hand, from Strat’s awful marketing angle, it’s interesting how the game has been around over 50 years and the host, a board game aficionado, had still barely heard of it.